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Ripley
Known as Upper Bundanba (now spelt Bundamba) before being named Ripley. It is not known where the name Ripley received its origins but the name was written across the area now known as South Ripley on a map drawn in 1873.
James England was one of the early settlers of the Moreton Bay Colony. He was born in Lopen in Somerset in 1814 and he arrived in Sydney in 1838 as a sponsored immigrant on the ‘Coromandel’ as a shoemaker. His family in Somerset was officially classified as being amongst the poor of their parish and received assistance under the Poor Laws of the time. In January 1844, James came to notice in Moreton Bay as a buyer of Crown land in North Brisbane. This was the first of a countless number of land transactions he made during the rest of his life. In this field of endeavour, he was fortunate to have received the financial backing of the Bank of New South Wales. After conducting a boot-making business in Ipswich for a short time, James became a grazier on upper Bundanba Creek where his property was known as Bundanba Station. When he decided to sell it in 1854, the station covered an area of 25 000 acres of freehold and leased land and was the largest single pastoral and agricultural enterprise in the upper Bundanba Creek and Oxley Creek region with 5,000 sheep and 800 cattle and an area growing maize. His homestead overlooked a small lagoon to the west of where the Upper Bundanba School was built in 1874 (renamed Ripley State School in 1909). The centre piece was the Bundanba Lagoon (Daly’s Lagoon). In the sale notice, he claimed that the land could not be surpassed in any part of the Colony.
Mapping records from 1852 show that James England held all the land surrounding the lagoon and that Owen Daly whose name has been given to the lagoon held the neighbouring block to England on the western side across the designated roadway. James England sold the Bundanba Station to James Ivory who had a good deal to do with this area as a leasehold and freehold owner of land. The Queensland Post Office Directory doesn't contain an entry for Ripley until 1892. In that year the entry for Ripley (Upper Bundamba) contained the names of twenty people. In 1901 there were twenty-one which was five farmers, nine graziers, four timber getter's, one teacher and one contractor.
References (online)Upper Bundanba and Redbank Plains